Run CrystalDiskMark on it. Its a low tech performance test that will show you the random reads as well as the sustained transfer speed. While the sustained transfer speed is what a lot of people look at when it comes to SSDs in practice the random performance at 4K is what makes them feel so much faster than a HDD.
SSDs are only 5x faster in big transfers, but 100x at random access. My problem with USB 3.0 in general has been the generally poor random IO performance, it costs quite a lot of performance to convert to USB 3.0 instead of just using e-sata.

I woke up a few days ago and realized I was still carrying the same 32 GB USB flash drive on my keychain that I purchased in 2010. I thought to myself, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. Totally. Unacceptable. It's been few years since I seriously looked at USB drive performance. Premi...

Small form factors are great for computing on the go and do a decent job of consumption. It will take a break through in interfaces and input controllers before we can actually be productive with a phone, but really its just air keyboards and projection onto the air to make a decent workstation. Or we just plug it in. Phones are still a very long way away from the performance of PCs despite their Mhz and core counts but CPU core power consumption is gradually decreasing to meet them
But people keep saying that current desktops are so fast that people can do anything on them but its simply not true. Imagine I gave you 100,000x the computing power, you and I would find new novel apps involving progressively smarter and more capable learning software. Algorithms we currently run in the "cloud" would be executable on the local machine at a lot less expense. The software you find on PCs today is what will run, there is after all no point writing a program that needs a computer that has computation power far in excess of what one can make.
What we are seeing is the end of the Mhz race as single threaded performance crawls to a meagre 10% gain every 2 years instead of more than 100% every 2 years off the back of Moore's law. Further to that the core explosion stopped at quads because no one could utilise the additional cores and the memory bus couldn't keep up. Modern CPUs are a cache with a small bit of logic on the side that represents the cores.
The tech industry is finding one way it can go is smaller and less power consumption, so they will pursue that until it too stops scaling. But don't misconstrue the hardware scaling crysis for a lack of need for the performance, we can always do cleverer things with more performance, its still a concern we have to think about constantly as programmers.

MG Siegler writes: The PC is over. It will linger, but increasingly as a relic. I now dread using my computer. I want to use a tablet most of the time. And increasingly, I can. I want to use a smartphone all the rest of the time. And I do. The value in the desktop web is increasingly an ...